NEW YORK, NY.- Martin Schoeller's portraiture is renowned for its indelible, ultra-close-ups, with a tone, mood and compositional consistency that have energized the pages of many of America’s and Europe’s most respected publications over the last 20 years.

But these revelatory photographs are just the most recognizable slice of his astonishingly searching, restless oeuvre. Schoeller has now amassed a body of work that defies classification, as he has ventured into all but invisible subcultures, the most current events, breakdowns in social justice, celebrity and several other sub-categories of public interest.

As seen collectively in Martin Schoeller 1999–2019, these images comprise a veritable museum of recent history—a varied, imaginative, buoyant, disciplined and conscientious project that is the work of an inexhaustibly humane outlook.

“I had got sentenced, I was just 17, and was in that holding cell downstairs in the courthouse before they brought us back to the old jail. So I was sitting in that cell and, I’ll never forget, the deputy that came to get me was an older black man. He might’ve been 60-61 years old and he looked at me and said, ‘Come on baby,’ he said, ‘I have to take you back.’ And that’s when I realized that my life would change forever. Because up to that point, you know, guards were not nice to nobody. I could see the father in him. I could see the hurt on his face. He was going to take this kid to a cell and he knew they were sending me to die. I could just see it and it radiated. I got it. I got it. I never forgot him.” --Kwame Ajamu

"Like most portrait photographers, I aim to record the instant the subject is not thinking about being photographed. I strive to get beyond the subject's practiced facial presentation, reaching for something unplanned." --Martin Schoeller

Born in 1968, Martin Schoeller is an award-winning portrait photographer renowned for his extreme close-up portraits. Schoeller worked as an assistant to Annie Leibovitz from 1993 to 1996, and since 1998 his work has appeared in Rolling Stone, National Geographic, Time, GQ, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. He joined Richard Avedon as a contributing portrait photographer at the New Yorker in 1999, where he continues to work. Schoeller exhibits internationally and his photography is held in collections including the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.